Drop Box and Dropbox, begs new sync 'n' share start-up

Another cloud file player muscles into increasingly crowded field

Yet another start-up touting its own cloud-based file sync 'n' share for business has popped up. Egnyte says its got a Cloud Control product does the same thing as Box and DropBox, but with more security and control.

The company was founded in 2007 and is backed by venture capitalists keen to see it to hit the IPO street or get gobbled up by a bigger fish. It says over 1 billion files a day are shared by its business customers with its Egnyte HybridCloud File Server. What's the skinny with the new product?

The targeted customer has a complex infrastructure and needs to keep sensitive data tucked behind behind a firewall. They won't want to stick it in the cloud unprotected as control over the data's access could be lost.

Cloud Control is designed to offer file-sharing security, scalability, and control a with all or some of the data stored behind the firewall. Here's what the company says about it:

Cloud Control allows customers to stitch together a quilt of different storage devices and cloud types into a Global Name Space that gives users access to files irrespective of location, device type, or storage cloud. In this way, storage is effectively decoupled from the application and nodes can be strategically placed in different geographies to take advantage of access patterns.

Content can live completely behind the firewall, in a third party storage cloud such as AWS S3, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, etc. or in Egnyte’s public cloud. Within corporate networks, Cloud Control works off of existing file system structures, does not force deployment of proprietary file systems and allows direct access to local shares. This approach is exclusive to Egnyte and allows enterprises to retain all the benefits of the cloud, such as scalability, elasticity and security.

An Egnyte spokesperson likened it to a concierge service: "I use concierge as an analogy because they know all the secrets in a building and can be trusted to keep them. If workers come in to fix the lift, the concierge will take them to the control room. Likewise, Egnyte can give the right employees the permission to access sensitive data."

The company will have to motor ahead quickly; file sync 'n share is likely to become a standard offering of cloud service providers and then best-of-breed offerings, like Egnyte's, will need something special to stand out, both from the major CSPs and from a host of similar start-ups such as InfraScale and Druva. There will be blood.

Cloud Control is in an invitation-only beta test, and is slated to be publicly available towards the end 2013's first quarter. If you're interested in joining the beta test, you can email Egnyte here. ®